Patent application title: METHOD AND MEANS FOR BROWSING BY WALKING

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Abstract:

A mobile station is arranged to determine its location, which is searched
against street addresses from a database, and at least one matching
street address is retrieved. The street address is searched on the mobile
station and/or over the network. The search engine conducts a search in
the mobile station file system and/or the Internet and/or a file system
over the network with the at least one query term, --at least one search
result is arranged to be displayed to user on the screen of the mobile
station. This facilitates on-demand effortless Mobile Internet Search
that allows the users to access opportunities that they did not know
about, or would not have had time to find out about with minimum effort
as the software of the mobile phone is scanning the Internet and
information pages for these opportunities and displaying the results
dynamically on the mobile phone screen.

Claims:

1. A mobile search method comprising at least one mobile station with a
communication network connection, and the mobile station location is
determined, and said mobile station connects and/or is connected to at
least one communication network of at least one computer (100),
characterised by the steps of: said at least one search engine conducts
at least one search in at least one said mobile station file system
and/or the Internet and/or a file system in the said network with said
location as a search parameter (130), provided at least one search result
reaches a certain relevance level, the mobile station produces a sound,
light and/or vibration signal.

2. A mobile search method as claimed in claim 1, characterised in that,
any or all of the phases (100, 110, 120, 130, 140) is conducted
automatically, and the transition from any of the following: phase 100 to
phase 110 and/or phase 110 to phase 120 and/or phase 120 to phase 130
and/or phase 130 to phase 140 and/or phase 130 to phase 150 and/or phase
140 to phase 150 is automatic or all of the said transitions are
automatic.

3. A mobile search method as claimed in claim 1, characterised in that,
the user may enter a term into the mobile station (30, 40, 500, 600) by
text input or speech and said search results are searched and/or ranked
based on said at least one user term.

4. A mobile search method as claimed in claim 1, characterised in that,
as the mobile station changes location and/or time goes by, the location
data and/or time are updated automatically and a new search is conducted
automatically based on changed location data and/or time (150).

5. A mobile search method as claimed in claim 1, characterised in that,
at least one search result is a webpage with an electronic form (350,
450) and the mobile station software automatically fills one or more
entries on the electronic form based on data in the memory or storage of
the mobile station.

6. A mobile search method as claimed in claim 1, characterised in that,
the mobile station stores and/or prints a file of the search result
and/or filled electronic form and stores said file (840).

7. A mobile search method as claimed in claim 6, characterised in that,
said file (840) is stored and/or sent to a different computer over the
network, data in said file is inputted into a financial and/or archiving
software.

8. (canceled)

9. A mobile station, arranged to determine its location, and arranged to
connect to a communication network of at least one computer (100)
characterised in that, said at least one search engine is arranged to
conduct at least one search in at least one said mobile station file
system and/or the Internet and/or a file system in the network with said
location as a search parameter (130), at least one search result is
arranged to be displayed to user on the screen of the mobile station
(140), provided at least one search result reaches a certain relevance
level, the mobile station is arranged to produce a sound, light and/or
vibration signal.

10. A mobile station as claimed in claim 9, characterised in that, any or
all of the phases (100, 110, 120, 130, 140) is arranged to be conducted
automatically, and the transition from any of the following: phase 100 to
phase 110 and/or phase 110 to phase 120 and/or phase 120 to phase 130
and/or phase 130 to phase 140 is arranged to be automatic or all of the
said transitions are arranged to be automatic.

11. A mobile station as claimed in claim 9, characterised in that, the
mobile station (30, 40, 500, 600) is arranged to receive a user specified
term by text input or speech and said search results are ranked based on
said at least one user term.

12. A mobile station as claimed in claim 9, characterised in that, at
least one webpage that is listed in said search results (340, 440) is
arranged to be provided to the user (550) for accessing.

13. A mobile station as claimed in claim 9, characterised in that, at
least one webpage that is listed in said search results (340, 440) is
arranged to be provided to the user (550) for accessing.

14. A mobile station as claimed in claim 9, characterised in that, the
mobile station is arranged to store and/or print a file of the search
result and/or filled electronic form and store said file (70).

15. A mobile station as claimed in claim 14, characterised in that, said
file is stored and/or sent to a different computer over the network
(730), data in said file is inputted into a financial and/or archiving
software (740).

16. A mobile station as claimed in claim 9, characterised in that, as the
mobile station changes location and/or time goes by, the location data
and/or time are arranged to be updated automatically and a new search is
arranged to be conducted automatically based on changed location data
and/or time (150).

17-24. (canceled)

25. A software program product arranged to determine the location of at
least one mobile station (100), characterised in that, said at least one
search engine is arranged to conduct at least one search in at least one
said mobile station file system and/or the Internet and/or a file system
over the network with said location as a search parameter (130), provided
at least one search result reaches a certain relevance level, the
software program product instructs the mobile station to produce a sound,
light and/or vibration signal.

26. A software program product as claimed in claim 25, characterised in
that, any or all of the phases (100, 110, 120, 130, 140) is conducted
automatically, and the transition from any of the following: phase 100 to
phase 110 and/or phase 110 to phase 120 and/or phase 120 to phase 130
and/or phase 130 to phase 140 is automatic or all of said transitions are
automatic.

27. A software program product as claimed in claim 25, characterised in
that, the software program product is arranged to receive a user
specified term by text input or speech and said search results are ranked
based on said user term.

28. A software program product as claimed in claim 25, characterised in
that, the software program product is arranged to receive a user
specified term by text input or speech and said search results are ranked
based on said user term.

29. A software program product as claimed in claim 25, characterised in
that, the software program product is arranged to receive a user
specified term by text input or speech and said search results are ranked
based on said user term.

30. A software program product as claimed in claim 25, characterised in
that, the software program product is arranged to store and/or print a
file of the search result and/or filled electronic form and store said
file (840, 70).

31. A software program product as claimed in claim 25, characterised in
that, said file is arranged to be stored and/or sent to a different
computer over a network (730), and data in said file is arranged to be
inputted into financial and/or archiving software (740).

32-69. (canceled)

Description:

TECHNICAL FIELD OF INVENTION

[0001] The invention relates to people browsing the Internet by walking to
discover search results as they come near them. In more particular, the
invention relates to browsing pages of information based on location and
profile, and conducting "on the spot" commercial transactions that may
involve payments.

BACKGROUND

[0002] Urbanisation and globalization progress inevitably every day. More
and more companies and organizations offer their products over the
Internet and offer fewer customer attendants on site. Further the
commercial transactions are ever more complicated, with customer loyalty
cards, credit cards, and ID cards all being swiped for one purchase of
e.g. a sandwich.

[0003] On the other hand end customers move more and more each day. A
typical sales representative in the EU might be in 5 different countries
during a working week. With more mobile customers, and ever reduced
investment to serve said customers there is a clear long felt need to
develop technologies that would allow the customers to automatically
access the services and products of companies or organisations, easily,
right at the moment, right at the location, with minimum cost.

[0004] To address this need several mobile cellular techniques have been
devised to purchase a product for consumption on site, without the
customer addressing the service attendant. Perhaps one of the most
successful practical technologies is the one developed in Helsinki
Finland by Plusdial Oy for accessing public transport tickets. Nearly
every tram in Helsinki has a mobile phone number on the wall of the tram,
to which the customers can SMS a coded message, and one standard adult
ticket will be sent by return SMS with the fee deducted from the phone
bill. This system suffers from a major disadvantage in that people need
to find and read the instructions from the wall, and the system can issue
only one type of ticket: standard one way ticket.

[0005] It is also known from WO 2009/022356 that SMS based forms can be
used by key value pairs. This document is cited here as reference. This
text based method requires a lot of typing from the users within a form
limited to 160 characters.

[0006] It is also known from publication WO 02/39765 of the inventor, how
non-intrusive advertisements or messages could be shown to mobile phone
users on the display, for example based on location as the user enters or
leaves a cell of the cellular network. This document is cited here as
reference. The disadvantage associated with this document is that the
fact that the message does not intrude does not mean that the user needs
or is interested in the message at all, and it is even less probable that
the user is interested in the message at the moment and place of
receiving the message.

[0007] It is also within the prior art to purchase goods by filling a form
on the Internet while accessing it with a mobile phone, which allows for
more complex transactions.

[0008] It is also known that search engines and any electronic information
retrieval (IR) device operate by indexing. Indexing is the process by
which a vocabulary of keywords is assigned to all documents of a corpus
(=body of documents, such as the Internet or US congress library).
Mathematically, an index is a relation mapping each document to the set
of keywords that it is about:

##STR00001##

[0009] The inverse mapping captures, for each keyword, the documents it
describes:

##STR00002##

[0010] The index relation is the fundamental connection between the user's
expressions of information need and the documents that can satisfy them,
this simply stated goal--"Build the Index relation"--is at the core of
the IR problem and Finding Out About (FOA) generally, [Finding Out About,
Richard Belew, cited and quoted here as reference].

[0011] These days search engines use web crawler software to pinpoint and
pickup keywords from web pages and build the index relation. In doing so,
web crawler indexing software will choose rare and relevant words to
build the index relation. The fact that "and" is on a webpage is not
really interesting because it does not limit the search, whereas
"hypothermia" is a very rare word in the world wide web, and would
probably be chosen as a keyword. Thus, a prior art search engine will
search all keywords, but it will ignore words such as "and", "to" and
many isolated alphanumeric characters such as "10" or "10-7 pm", because
they are extremely frequent in the billions of web pages and essentially
do not limit the search at all.

[0012] It is also known that Google mobile search and Google Maps for
mobile deduces the location of the mobile phone from GPS data,
WLAN-based/WIFI based services and Cell transmitter based services in
this order of precedence (source: Google Maps-Wikipedia). The location is
taken into account so that the user does not need to type his location in
Google mobile search. Google Mobile also provides for automatic updating
of the background location.

[0013] The problem faced by the prior art on the search side is that while
location related human language identifiers are unique enough to be
picked up as identifiers, such as the address "Fabianinkatu, Helsinki,
Finland", many time-space related information, like the co-ordinates
(longitude, latitude):

24.949586391448974, 60.16525494433567 Or "open weekdays 9 am-5 pm", are
not indexed at all, or not quoted by web page owners on their sites.

[0014] Consequently when you try to search for a barber that would be open
with available reservations as you are walking home from work, on the
spot within your current postcode, right now, you end up having to search
several web pages in advance that might be good candidates for providing
the barber service, and manually inspecting whether they are actually
open/closed/available/not available and so on. Walking on the street
while staring at the mobile phone screen for search results could get the
user driven over by a car, in addition to being distracting and
unpleasant to consumers. Mobile Data Roaming is also very expensive in
many countries.

[0015] Quite clearly what is needed is a dynamically and contextually
aware automatic mechanism on the query side while having a dynamically
and contextually aware search engine on the reply side to assist the user
in passively browsing the information space as he changes location and
time goes by, and providing the relevant results thereto, which can be
then noticed and re-acted to with minimum effort. This should also be low
cost, and not use cellular roaming connections if cheaper ones are
available. The invention solves just this problem.

SUMMARY

[0016] The invention under study is directed towards a system and a method
for effectively finding and accessing the electronic point of
distribution of a good or service with a mobile station as the user
intends to use, retrieve or purchase the service. For a walking consumer
with a mobile phone, the consumer is browsing the web pages by his
movement in space-time and his context, hence the title of the
application.

[0017] A further object of the invention is to present a system and a
method where some or all of the interactions at the electronic point of
distribution are automated by the mobile station.

[0018] One aspect of the invention involves a mobile phone that is used by
a user. The location of the user is discovered from a GPS
receiver/transceiver in the mobile phone, or by the cell in the cellular
network or by triangulation or other location determining methods. This
location information is translated to at least one street address(es) for
example by searching the information against a database of addresses in
the mobile phone or over the network on a network server. The addresses
are then used further as search terms to search over the Internet. Quite
clearly, as the person walks for example on the street called
"Fabianinkatu" in 00130 Helsinki, the web pages of companies at this
address start popping out automatically as search results, as the mobile
phone browses the Internet as the user moves on this street.
Alternatively or in addition to posting information on the Internet, the
companies can send information pages via Bluetooth and/or WLAN or other
local short range information link in accordance with the invention.

[0019] If the user now types in "Hotel" into a search engine query field
in his mobile phone, the mobile Internet and/or file system browser
software and/or search engine software of the invention will realise that
the user is searching for a hotel. Consequently, the search engine will
rank and the browser will display for example the room reservation pages
of hotels on Fabianinkatu ahead of other web pages. Further, if the
Desktop/browser history of the user contains mainly confirmation emails
with hotel rates of 100 Euros, the web pages of hotels with these rates
are ranked ahead of others. Alternatively if there is a payday receipt
showing mid-to-high income in the inbox or the file system, the search
engine can use mathematical methods to deduce that e.g. 3-4 star hotels
are the most relevant accommodation options for this user. After a search
result is discovered that achieves or exceeds a certain relevance level,
an alert is signalled from the mobile station, by sound, vibration,
and/or light emission. This way the user will notice the hotel room
opportunity as he is walking close by with the mobile station in his
pocket.

[0020] When the user decides to access the reservation page and decides to
book a hotel room, the browser/mobile phone software will automatically
fill in the entries on the electronic reservation form, such as name,
birth date, credit card number, customer loyalty card number and the
like. The aforementioned data can be retrieved from the mobile phone
memory, and only minimal information is required by the user to fill into
entry fields with the keyboard. For example, in one embodiment only the
security code of the card is requested to be entered manually. The user
can now book the room in 20 seconds or so, a couple of blocks away from
the hotel, without visiting the hotel, or without searching maps and
hotels over the Internet. If the user has a business meeting or a
conference at the postcode 00130, and needs a room for the night nearby,
he can use the invention to avoid queues in receptions or the studying of
maps and markets on traditional sites such as hotels.com® or the
like. To facilitate this service the mobile phone is typically connected
to the Internet. However, it is possible in some embodiments that the
hotels would send their electronic information via a Bluetooth or like
local connection, and the inventive system would be arranged to search
data available via said local connection in addition to or as replacement
of the Internet.

[0021] After the booking has been made, the inventive mobile phone browser
software prints the reservation confirmation or receipt for example as a
PDF document to a file and/or on paper. This document could be
automatically placed into a "receipts" folder, for later bookkeeping, or
sent directly to an email address, IP-address, ftp address or other
electronic address for bookkeeping. For example the PDF document of the
hotel receipt could be sent to an invoice processing email of the company
the user works for, and an enterprise resource management (ERM) software
could automatically book the hotel fee as a business expense. From the
PDF document the ERM software recognises for example the VAT (Value Added
Tax) and total sum and other bill related financial parameters by
searching and retrieving them to memory and/or scanning them for search
and retrieval by e.g. "OCR" (Object Character Recognition), if the
relevant items are not in text format, but rather in image format. Thus
the user would not need to store a paper receipt to his pocket in
accordance with the invention, and considerable administrative overhead
is reduced.

[0022] So, for example in the case of a traveller without a hotel room in
Helsinki, the user could set his mobile station to browse hotel room
deals as he walks on the streets of Helsinki. The query parameters are
automatically updated as the user moves in space-time and hence the
search results are updated on the mobile phone screen as the user walks
the streets and time goes by. In some embodiments the search results are
not shown on the screen. It is useful to turn the screen off, and
continue searching in accordance with the invention. In some embodiments,
if there is a very good match to the search parameters a voice, sound,
vibration and/or light signal is provided as an alarm to the user from
the mobile station, signalling that he should look at the opportunity on
the mobile station screen and/or the physical proximity more closely, and
the screen is arranged to be lit up when this happens and/or in response
to user action to said signal. This is typically conducted so that once a
certain relevance level is exceeded by a search result the mobile phone
software instructs the loudspeaker, vibrator and/or light to produce a
certain signal. In one embodiment the mobile phone may ring and/or play a
ringtone to signal a highly relevant search result. In one embodiment the
mobile station vibrates the battery or screen and/or flashes a LED light
and/or screen when a relevance level is exceeded. In some embodiments the
user can set the threshold level of relevance for signal activation from
his mobile station manually, but in other embodiments the search engine,
mobile station, and/or a network server computer can set the threshold
level of relevance or suggest suitable threshold levels to the user in
accordance with the invention.

[0023] The invention makes possible a whole new phenomenon of human
behaviour that has multiple advantages. The inventor has named the
activity "walkbrowsing" or "browwalking". Of course the person is not
walking on his eye brows, but rather he is passively or actively surfing
the information space (e.g. Internet and local information networks) with
his path in space-time as the dynamic search parameter. The user does not
need to look at the screen of the mobile phone as he browses by walking.
When something relevant is discovered by the search, he receives an alarm
signal from the mobile station disclosing that an interesting search
result is in the physical proximity.

[0024] Suppose a user is roaming the streets of London say on Piccadilly
at 2 pm, with an airline e-ticket in the Inbox of the email software with
flight details of the flight departing the same day 5 hours later at 7 pm
on Sunday. Quite clearly, the inventive software will only be looking for
activities that start and end in a time space of 2-3 hours in reasonable
proximity to the area surrounding Piccadilly. The user types "museum"
into the mobile station as input to a search engine. The search engine
returns a webpage of the Royal Academy of Arts, which shows that there is
an Exhibition titled "Glasgow Boys"; the museum is open, and just around
the corner. This activity interests the user, he clicks on "tickets" on
the webpage and the electronic purchase form is auto-filled by the mobile
phone software of the invention. Consequently, the user clicks accept
purchase, the mobile phone software retrieves the receipt electronically,
and the user walks past the ticket queues into the exhibition, and shows
the receipt if the ticket is controlled.

[0025] What happens in the network side of the inventive software system?
Naturally the web pages need to be "crawled" by a search engine indexing
software, commonly referred to as "web crawler". A web crawler typically
analyzes a corpus of documents. For example the web crawlers of search
engines like Google or Yahoo are "crawling" the entire public Internet
and thereby arranging documents. For many of the known aspects of
Information Retrieval, the reader is referred to the book "Finding Out
About", by Richard K. Belew, which document is cited here as reference.

[0026] In one aspect of the invention, the prior art search engine is
inventively improved to accommodate "browwalking". The inventive web
crawler or information page crawler of the inventive search engine crawls
for keywords in the usual way, but also for space-time access relevant
information, such as location, opening hours at that location and/or
price information at that location. The information extracted by and
available in the inventive search engine is thus more multidimensional
than in prior art search engines. In the extraction data OCR can be used
to retrieve textual data in image format.

[0027] Now as the inventive mobile phone software receives a query:
"museum" from the user, it can ask the search engine a coded query along
the lines: "What museum associated activities are available for a
mid-to-high income individual walking on Piccadilly in London UK on this
Sunday afternoon now with a flight to catch in five hours?" Of course,
this query is much more specific than the user typed query, and the
matches to this query can be expected to be more relevant. In fact, many
people would not realise to ask a search query from a search engine in
this detail. By providing the relevant contextual parameters and
translating them into query terms, the invention makes it easier for the
user to know what to know & ask when he is on the move with his mobile
station.

[0028] Even more importantly the inventive search engine provides search
results based on consensual relevance at a certain location and/or time.
The inventive search engine can store click through rates for websites as
a function of the user's query location. If it turns out that, say more
than 20%, of people searching and querying for a museum around Piccadilly
London indeed click onto the Royal Academy of Arts, their webpage's
relevance weight will be increased, as is very likely that the next
person querying "museum" at Piccadilly is also trying to find the Royal
Academy of Arts.

[0029] The invention thus has the revolutionary and pioneering advantage
of allowing people to scan opportunities in the information space as they
traverse through space-time in their own context. The invention
facilitates on-demand effortless Mobile Internet Search that allows the
users to browse passively or actively and access opportunities that they
did not know about, or would not have had time to find out about with
minimum effort as the software of the mobile phone is scanning the
Internet and information pages for these opportunities and displaying the
results dynamically on the mobile phone screen, or alerting about
relevant results instead of displaying them all the time.

[0030] From the service provider perspective the invention provides
equally revolutionary advantages. For example, if there is a cancellation
at say a barber on the same day, the barber shop can possibly quickly
acquire new customers by updating the reservation information and making
it available over the Internet and/or a short range communication link,
by allowing users that are passively looking for the service and happen
to be in the neighbourhood to find the offered hair cutting service with
their mobile stations. Quite clearly this is a far more effective way for
businesses to find customers than emailing discount vouchers to half a
million people at a time, and paying a lot of money for emails nobody
reads and everybody hates, or purchasing conventional location based web
links on Google. It is remarkably convenient to just take a haircut or
purchase a burgundy silk tie on the way home spontaneously, but nobody is
willing to pop into every barber to ask whether they are available, or go
through tie racks of every shop, only to discover that burgundy ties have
been sold out.

[0031] A mobile search method is in accordance with the invention and
comprises at least one mobile station with a communication network
connection, and the mobile station location is determined, and said
mobile station connects and/or is connected to at least one communication
network and is characterised by the steps of: [0032] said location is
searched against street addresses from at least one database and/or
search engine on the mobile station and/or in the network, and at least
one matching street address is computed and/or retrieved, [0033] said at
least one street address is inputted as a query term into at least one
search engine on the mobile station and/or in the network, [0034] said at
least one search engine conducts at least one search in at least one said
mobile station file system and/or the Internet and/or a file system in
the network with said at least one query term, [0035] at least one search
result is displayed to user on the screen of the mobile station.

[0036] A mobile station, arranged to determine its location, and arranged
to connect to a communication network is in accordance with the invention
and characterised in that, [0037] the said determined location is
arranged to be searched against street addresses from at least one
database and/or search engine on the mobile station and/or in the
network, and at least one matching street address is arranged to be
computed and/or retrieved, [0038] said at least one street address is
arranged to be inputted as a query term into at least one search engine
on the mobile station and/or in the network, [0039] said at least one
search engine is arranged to conduct at least one search in at least one
said mobile station file system and/or the Internet and/or a file system
in the network with said at least one query term, [0040] at least one
search result is arranged to be displayed to user on the screen of the
mobile station.

[0041] A network server arranged to receive location data from at least
one mobile station and/or determine location of said mobile station is in
accordance with the invention and characterised in that, [0042] said
location data is searched against street addresses from at least one
database and/or search engine on the mobile station and/or in the
network, and at least one matching street address is arranged to be
computed and/or retrieved, [0043] said at least one street address is
arranged to be inputted as a query term into at least one search engine
on the mobile station and/or in the network, [0044] said at least one
search engine is arranged to conduct at least one search in at least one
said mobile station file system and/or the Internet and/or a file system
in the network with said at least one query term, [0045] at least one
search result is arranged to be displayed to the user on the screen of
the mobile station.

[0046] A software program product arranged to determine the location of at
least one mobile station is in accordance with the invention and
characterised in that, [0047] said location is arranged to be searched
against street addresses from at least one database and/or search engine,
and at least one matching street address is computed and/or retrieved,
[0048] said at least one street address is inputted as a query term into
at least one search engine, [0049] said at least one search engine is
arranged to conduct at least one search in at least one said mobile
station file system and/or the Internet and/or a file system over a
network with said at least one query term, [0050] at least one search
result is arranged to be displayed to user on a screen of a mobile
station.

[0051] In the above inventions of four preceding paragraphs the
click-through rate from the user location is stored for at least one
search result. This can be used in the ranking of the search results in
the future. It is in accordance with the invention to rank web sites with
high click-through rates from a specific location as relevant at that
location. Similarly click through rates may be stored as a function of
time of the query in accordance with the invention. Similarly click
through rates may be stored as a function of time of the query and
location in accordance with the invention. These inventions greatly
improve the accuracy of location based search. As the relevance scale
become more meaningful by the consensual relevance weights deduced from
click through rates, the inventive mobile station alert signals when a
relevance level has been achieved or exceeded for a search result become
more and more useful in everyday life.

[0052] A search engine with an index relation is in accordance with the
invention and is characterised in that, the index is time and/or location
sensitive to at least one incoming query.

[0053] A search engine with an index relation is in accordance with the
invention and characterised in that the index is arranged to calculate a
numerical weight to the association between at least one time and/or user
location of an incoming query and at least one document.

[0054] An electronic transaction method is in accordance with the
invention and characterised in that, [0055] at least one computer sends
a short range information page signal, [0056] at least one mobile station
in range receives said signal, [0057] at least one said mobile station
software and/or said computer software searches said information pages
with at least one query term, [0058] at least one search result is shown
on the display of the mobile station.

[0059] A mobile station in accordance with the invention is characterised
in that, [0060] at least one computer is arranged to send a short range
information page signal to said mobile station, [0061] the said mobile
station in range is arranged to receive said information page signal,
[0062] at least one mobile station software and/or said computer software
is arranged to search said information pages with at least one query
term, [0063] at least one search result is arranged to be shown on the
display of the mobile station.

[0064] A network server in accordance with the invention is characterised
in that, [0065] the network server is arranged to send a short range
information page signal to said mobile station, [0066] the said mobile
station in range is arranged to receive said information page signal and
form a duplex connection, [0067] at least one mobile station software
and/or network server is arranged to search said information pages with
at least one query term, [0068] at least one search result is arranged to
be shown on the display of the mobile station.

[0069] A "duplex" connection means that information can flow in both
directions, e.g. from mobile station to server and vice versa. Albeit
some security restrictions could be implemented to control the flow of
sensitive information via the short range connections in accordance with
the invention.

[0070] A software program product in accordance with the invention is
characterised in that, [0071] at least one information page signal is
arranged to be sent by a computer and a short range communication link,
[0072] at least one mobile station in said range is arranged to receive
said signal, [0073] said software program product searches said
information pages with at least one query term received from said mobile
station, [0074] at least one search result is arranged to be shown on the
display of the mobile station.

[0075] In addition and with reference to the aforementioned advantage
accruing embodiments, the best mode of the invention is considered to be
client software on a mobile phone or other mobile station that can
connect to a search engine over a network and dynamically search the
Internet with user specified query terms and the space-time position of
the mobile phone and signal an alert when the user is
physically/geographically close to a relevant search result. Further in
the best mode the mobile client software can search information pages
displayed via a short range connection, such as WLAN or Bluetooth
independently. Even further in the best mode search results with high
location specific click-through rates are given high relevance weights
for queries that take place in the location with the high click-through
rate. The best mode of the invention is therefore a mobile search client
and a search engine that matches, alerts and shows on the mobile phone
screen the users to the closest documents in consensual relevance and
space-time when relevance to the query exceeds a threshold limit, for
both documents that are on the Internet and documents that are being sent
by local computers via short range communication links to the mobile
station for review.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

[0076] In the following the invention will be described in greater detail
with reference to exemplary embodiments in accordance with the
accompanying drawings, in which

[0078] FIG. 2 demonstrates an exemplary embodiment 20 of the inventive
browsing method implemented with short range communication links in
accordance with the invention.

[0079] FIG. 3 demonstrates an exemplary embodiment 30 of the inventive
mobile station when the invention is in use.

[0080] FIG. 4 demonstrates an exemplary embodiment 40 of the inventive
mobile station when at least one short range communication link of the
invention is in use.

[0081] FIG. 5 demonstrates an exemplary embodiment 50 of the inventive
communication system as a block diagram.

[0082] FIG. 6 demonstrates an exemplary embodiment 60 of the inventive
communication system when at least one short range communication link of
the invention is in use, and as a block diagram.

[0083]FIG. 7 demonstrates an exemplary embodiment 70 of the inventive
processing method used with the electronic page selected with the
inventive browsing method as a flow diagram.

[0084] FIG. 8 demonstrates an exemplary embodiment 80 of the inventive
processing method used with the electronic page selected with the
inventive browsing method as a block and flow diagram from the
perspective of the user.

[0085] FIG. 9 shows an exemplary embodiment 90 of an index relation in
accordance with the invention as a matrix.

[0086] FIG. 10 shows an exemplary embodiment 91 of the invention as a
network diagram that displays logical connections of search.

[0087] Some of the embodiments are described in the dependent claims.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF EMBODIMENTS

[0088] FIG. 1 demonstrates an embodiment of the inventive browsing method
10. In phase 100 the mobile station determines its location, or its
location is determined by the network or third party. In the first case,
the mobile station has a GPS receiver and/or transceiver that can
determine its location. In the other alternative, if the mobile station
is a cellular phone the location is determined from the cell identity the
mobile phone is currently in, or by triangulation between base stations.
In some embodiments sufficient location information is available in a
network register, such as a Home Location Register (HLR), and the
location of the mobile station can be read directly by a computer or the
mobile station from there. Other techniques for determining the location
could also be used in some embodiments of the invention, or the
aforementioned methods could be used together in combination in
accordance with the invention.

[0089] In phase 110 the said location information is compared to street
addresses or other natural language location identifiers, like names of
train stations or airports, e.g. Heathrow Airport, gives a location in a
natural language (west of London, UK) even though it may not be a street.
The location information is typically converted to natural language
addresses by searching using the location co-ordinates as a query for
matching natural language addresses in a database or group of databases
and/or over a network of computers and/or with a search engine. The
database or group of databases and/or network of computers can be for
example any server with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software
installed on it in some embodiments. For example The U.S. Board of
Geographic Names (BGS) and the earlier Federal Information Processing
Standards (FIPS) provide place information in the US, and could provide
such data, as well as other commercial and/or public place information
providers in the US, EU and elsewhere. Typically there may be more than
one matching street address in some embodiments.

[0090] In phase 120 at least one street address or natural language
location identifier is inputted as a search term into a search engine on
the mobile station and/or on a network computer. In some embodiments the
coordinate natural language address conversion is done at the search
engine. In this embodiment the mobile station software client could only
be feeding longitude and latitude coordinates into the search engine in
accordance with the invention. In some embodiments the location of the
mobile station is deduced by the search engine solely from network
parameters without involving the mobile station. Preferably all the
phases 100-110-120 are implemented automatically and as fast as possible
without user input, but in some embodiments the user can add and/or
delete one or more search terms or modify existing ones in phase 120,
and/or the current time could be added as a search term. In some
embodiments additional search terms are derived from the metadata and/or
contextual information on the mobile station. For example keyword
frequency in email inbox and/or desktop files could be used to define
contextual search terms and/or ranking terms in some embodiments.

[0091] In the case of more than one street address, multiple parallel
search queries for each street address and possible additional data as
explained before can be formulated to a set of queries in accordance with
the invention.

[0092] In phase 130 the said search engine searches with the search query
the file system of the mobile station and/or at least one network
computer and/or the Internet. In case of multiple queries the search
engine executes the various query alternatives in series and/or parallel.
In the case of multiple queries and results for each, in some embodiments
the search results are aggregated to one result list in accordance with
the invention. In some embodiments of the invention the search engine is
just a conventional search engine Internet site or its application
interface such as Google, Yahoo or the like. It is a known fact that the
interior workings of these search engines are quite well kept trade
secrets of their respective companies, and an independent developer
cannot necessarily replicate Google based on instructions in the public
domain. However, it is possible to use Google, Yahoo or other common
search engines in accordance with the invention based on a "black box"
approach. As the query sets or at least one query have been devised as
described in the earlier phases, these queries can be automatically fed
into Google or Yahoo with inputting software. This inputting software can
for example emulate keyboard presses at the Google prompt when the Google
input query line is active and feed the queries and collect search
results into its memory for each or some of the executed queries. A
computer script is then implemented to read the relevance scores, and
when a certain threshold is exceeded a mobile client application is
arranged to use the relevant mobile phone operating system/and/or
manufacturer API (Application Programmer Interface) to initiate a sound,
light and/or vibration signal with the mobile station.

[0093] Some search engines may cater for outside developers and it is in
accordance with the invention to realise the mobile station software with
a search engine application interface. For example Google Apps, the
application interface of the search engine Google could be used to input
the queries into the Google search engine automatically in some
embodiments. The search engine on at least one network computer can be
accessed in the network, over the network, across the network, or by any
other conceivable access mechanism in accordance with the invention in
some embodiments.

[0094] Alternatively, it is possible to build a dedicated search engine.
It should comprise a web crawler such as any of the following: LibWWW
Robot of the W3C Consortium, Perl based crawler interface by Gisle Aas,
Parallel UserAgent by Marc Langheinrich, and/or the Visual Web Spider by
Newprosoft.com. The web crawler is set to crawl web pages to compose the
Index relation. The mobile station software is directed to send their
search queries to a network computer with access to said Index relation,
which is arranged to receive them. In a simple basic embodiment, it would
be possible to require perfect matches to all keywords, and just rank
these documents in the order of when these documents were last updated,
i.e. to offer the latest complete hit or match to query parameters first.
This type of an index is usually referred to as binary index. The queries
produced by the inventive mobile station and/or search engine are
typically more accurate and situation specific than the queries on
average prior art engines. The relevant answers to the search queries are
therefore much clearer, and especially when the inventive click-through
rates at a certain location are stored by the mobile station and/or
search engine to deduce consensual relevance weights, the most relevant
search results will be clearer further still.

[0095] Of course the search engine could be independently implemented with
more complex weighting and matching schemes. We are essentially measuring
aboutness between the query and the documents, and a more sophisticated
way of doing this is to use real value weights to describe the strength
of the association between a document and a query, instead of the binary
(0/1) (No/Yes) method. In some embodiments the real value weight wkd
is proportional to number of occurrences of keyword k in document d noted
here as fkd. There are various alternatives to implementing the real
value weights, but in one embodiment the inverse document frequency (IDF)
approach is chosen with the Robertson & Sparck Jones weighting (Eq 3.22
Belew 2008):

wkd=fkd*(log[((NDoc-Dk)+0.5)/(Dk+0.5)])

where, NDoc is the number of documents and Dk the number of
documents with the keyword k. Also the more complex OKAPI weights of
equation 3.30 from Belew 2008 could be used in accordance with the
invention in some embodiments.

[0096] These real value weights can be placed in the matrix from w11
to wnm, shown in FIG. 9 index matrix in some embodiments. We can
take the inner product of the query and document vectors as our metric:

Sim(q,d)=qd

[0097] We define query q and all documents d to be vectors in a space of
dimensionality equal to Nkw, the keyword vocabulary size. The documents
that are the best match to the query are simply the ones that are most
similar relative to metric Sim measuring distance between points in the
space.

[0098] Further details to implement the basic information retrieval device
for the search engine from first principles can be found from Chapters
3-5 of Finding Out About, Belew, 2008. The same reference also discloses
additional mathematical techniques for the basic search engine such as
Minkowski Metric (equation 5.9, could be used with the aforementioned
vector space), singular value decomposition (SVD), the OKAPI retrieval
system and the like, which could also be used as needed in accordance
with the invention. Keyword discrimination and vector length
normalization could also be used in accordance with the invention
similarly as explained in Belew 2008.

[0099] In one embodiment the search engine over the Internet maintains and
stores a record of which documents such as web pages are accessed from
which geographic location the most and/or which web pages have been
accessed from which geographic location with what query the most. Mobile
users will probably not be searching for background literature for their
PhD's with the walkbrowsing system of the invention. Instead, they want
the very basic info and access ordering logistics when they are on the
move: for example more than half of the users of the invention typing
"train to London" at the Heathrow terminals could be expected to be
searching for Heathrow Express, or Heathrow Connect, or Piccadilly line
from the Tube. If this is evidenced by actual typed keywords and actual
traffic to those web sites, the web pages of these train services can be
arranged to receive very high consensual relevance weights for queries
from that location in accordance with the invention in some embodiments.
So if Heathrow express website has a high click-through rate (users
proceed from the search result frequently to the actual web page),
Heathrow express as a search result is likely to have a high relevance
score in accordance with the invention. Because people are typically
looking for very similar things in the same places the consensual
relevance weights and the observation of click-through rates from a
location is likely to increase search engine performance and reduce
processing power and bandwidth requirements for search as the results are
more relevant. The click-through rate is understood as the fraction of
users at that location, when being shown the search result, click on the
search result to view said search result or retrieve further information
from the search result.

[0100] Click-through rates to deduce the consensual relevance of search
results can be collected stored and used in at least three ways different
ways: [0101] 1) consensual relevance weights as a function of location:
click-through rates of search results with the user at a certain
location, [0102] 2) consensual relevance weights as a function of
location and time: click-through rates of search results with the user at
a certain location within a certain time range, [0103] 3) consensual
relevance weights as a function of location and time and user query:
click-through rates of search results with the user at a certain location
within a certain time range asking a certain query, e.g. "train?".
[0104] Quite clearly any permutation and/or combination of the above
three alternatives is also in accordance with the invention.

[0105] In one embodiment of the invention the searching and contextual
relevance ranking method outlined in EP09168388.8 and PCT/EP2010/061611
of the same patent family of the inventor could be used, which are
incorporated into this application as one of the searching and ranking
alternatives to be implemented on the search engine-server side. These
documents are also included as references. In phase 140 the mobile
station displays at least one search result on screen to user. Phase 140
is optional, and not all result to the updated searches need to be shown.
When the user is "walkbrowsing" with the mobile station in the pocket,
the display consumes power unnecessarily if it is on in the pocket when
the user is not looking at it. Typically the most relevant documents are
ranked first in some embodiments.

[0106] As the location changes by the mobile station moving, or time
changes as it goes by, the aforementioned searches are conducted again
with updated parameters and the search results on the screen of the
mobile station are refreshed. The constant automatic updating of the
parameters and refreshed search results allows the user to browse the
Internet with his motion through space time as one search parameter, and
discover new things about the current environmental surroundings with
minimal administrative effort in phase 150. Time of the query can be
automatically included as a query term in some embodiments. The time of
the query can be the current time, the point in time when the query is
sent or received, and/or a time mentioned in the query, like "Table for 7
pm?", being the query, 7 pm, is the time of query in some embodiments of
the invention. Time of query can be used as a query term in alphanumeric
format, numerical format or alphabetic format in accordance with the
invention in some embodiments. Similarly location of the query can be the
current location of user and/or mobile station and/or a location
mentioned in the query.

[0107] Thus, in the morning the user can just enter search terms into his
mobile phone, put the phone in the pocket and wait for beeps or other
signals identifying a match nearby.

[0108] The search terms may involve commercial products, but also any
other words, even people's names. In some embodiments the inventive
mobile search client is configured to signal when the search retrieves
e.g. a social network page of a friend that is geographically close. For
example, user enters "Tom" as query term, Tom updates his status "I am on
Fabianinkatu" to a social network page, the user gets to fabianinkatu or
close by and "fabianinkatu" is used as a search term with "Tom".
Consequently Tom's social network page is retrieved as a search result
and the user is signaled and Tom and the user can meet spontaneously on
fabianinkatu or nearby in accordance with the invention.

[0109] It should be noted that with the combination of user specified
query terms and location terms several permutations of the invention are
possible. In one embodiment the location terms are used to retrieve the
documents and the user specified term is used to search and/or rank
documents within this group of documents. In some embodiments the user
specified query term is used to retrieve the documents and the location
terms are used to search and/or rank documents within this group of
documents. In some embodiments the combination of location terms and user
specified terms is used as an integral query with multiple terms. The use
of location terms to retrieve documents has the advantage that no user
action is required. The use of user specified term first is more
economical, as location terms are used to search from a considerably
smaller collection of documents. This is likely to be an important
consideration as data roaming charges are quite considerable and
processing power is a scarce resource.

[0110] In order to save roaming data transfer resources and processing
power, the system can be optimized. In one embodiment a first broader
query is conducted for example as: pullover (user generated) London
(computer generated). The inventive system then searches just the
retrieved documents from this collection with more exact query terms as
they are determined, e.g. W8, a London postcode.

[0111] The same network computer or network of computers can execute all
or some of the phases 100, 110, 120, 130, 140 of the inventive method in
some embodiments. In some embodiments different phases are executed by
different network computers or networks of computers in accordance with
the invention. Focusing many phases in the same network computer or
network of computers allows for faster processing.

[0112] Quite clearly this continuous passive searching generates a lot of
traffic in the cellular network and the Internet, but the frequency of
the updating could be controlled by providing some control limits in
accordance with the invention.

[0113] It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the method
10 can be freely permuted and combined with embodiments 20, 30, 40, 50,
60, 70, 80, 90 and/or 91 in accordance with the invention.

[0114] FIG. 2 demonstrates an embodiment 20 of the inventive browsing
method implemented with short range communication links. In phase 200 at
least one computer sends a short range information page signal. In some
embodiments this signal is sent via Bluetooth or WLAN connection, which
is local, i.e. range a maximum of a few hundred meters. The short range
direct connection is a special case in the unified inventive concept,
because the type of the connection itself reveals proximity without the
need to use other location based parameters in the search terms. In phase
210 at least one mobile station receives the said information page
signal. The information page signal is typically similar to any Internet
page, but it is instead of the Internet sent directly via a short range
data connection. In fact in some embodiments of the invention some
parties may simply just keep broadcasting their web pages also via the
short range connections, such as WLAN or Bluetooth. This requires minimal
changes to existing systems. A WLAN base station that would have a
transmit URL or--webpage would be sufficient in some embodiments. The
owner of the WLAN link, say a cafe, would simply put the URL of its own
web pages as the transmit URL. When a user enters a query term "espresso"
into his mobile phone receiving the said signal, the mobile station
software searches in phase 220 with the search term "espresso" the
information pages of the aforementioned cafe, which are web pages in this
case. Of course the mobile station software may search other incoming
information pages, or may browse the Internet as outlined in embodiment
10 with the user specified term "espresso", and/or location data deduced
in embodiment 10.

[0115] In phase 230 at least one search result is displayed to the user on
the screen of the mobile phone. With a high likelihood the information
page of the cafe with espresso on it, such as the "menu" page will rank
quite high in the search results. In phase 240 the user accesses the said
information page, where espressos can be ordered and in some embodiments
also paid. In one embodiment the information page is an online order
form, which is auto-filled by the mobile station software, for example
providing any of the following: name, address, email address, phone
number, username, password, credit card details, bank details, internet
bank access codes, customer loyalty card data and/or the like. One or
more entry fields may be auto-filled in accordance with the invention. By
accepting and sending the online order the user can pay the product e.g.
espresso electronically from 50 metres away and proceed to collect his
coffee from the Barista by showing the receipt on the mobile phone
screen.

[0116] In some embodiments, the account details needed to process the
electronic transaction are stored in the mobile station memory and/or a
network computer memory, but on final approval the user is requested to
enter a PIN number, similarly to purchasing with bank- and/or credit
cards that have electronic chips. In some embodiments of the invention
the banking details could be stored in the SIM card chip inside the
mobile phone, similarly to the chip in the bank card. In other versions,
such as the "software SIM", the banking details would be stored in the
mobile station, network server or both.

[0117] In some embodiments any purchases are simply billed on the phone
bill of the mobile station and/or network subscription being used. In
this embodiment a useful optional alternative is to use the telephone
number for user identification.

[0118] It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the method
20 can be freely permuted and combined with embodiments 10, 30, 40, 50,
60, 70, 80, 90 and/or 91 in accordance with the invention.

[0119] FIG. 3 demonstrates an embodiment 30 of the inventive mobile
station when the invention is in use. The user is on Fabianinkatu in
Helsinki Finland at Decimal coordinates (longitude, latitude):

24.949586391448974, 60.16525494433567

[0120] In this embodiment these coordinates have been deduced by GPS, but
as said triangulation, cell identity, and other cellular based location
determination methods could be used as well, but they will probably
return less decimal places, i.e. provide less accuracy. The length of an
arc degree of north-south latitude difference Δφ, is about 60
nautical miles, 111 kilometres or 69 statute miles at any latitude. So
the 6th decimal place corresponds to roughly one meter, and the GPS
has roughly 10 cm intrinsic error, so;

24.9495864, 60.1652549 would be the position in relevant significant
figures. This position translates to being on Fabianinkatu as shown in
block 320 on the screen. When the natural language address parameters
with this position are inputted into a search engine with the user
specified query term "Hotel", search results listed in screen block 340
are shown on the mobile station screen. The full query in this case might
be for example:

[0122] Parentheses signify the origin of the query parameter. This query
can be synonym expanded into multiple queries in accordance with the
invention. The Boolean operators and, or, not, either/or, or other
logical operators, can also be changed between the query terms
automatically and/or manually to modify the query and/or to expand the
query to different alternatives in accordance with the invention such as:

[0123] In one embodiment the user could just select any webpage from the
hit list 340 by the usual way, pointing and clicking with the mouse,
finger or any other user interface command used by the mobile station. In
a more developed embodiment the contents of the mobile station and/or
past browsing behaviour could be used to define a context for the user.
For example if the user's inbox has confirmation emails and messages with
hotel reservations costing about 100-150 Euros/night, and/or there is no
reservation for tonight anywhere in the file system or email software of
the mobile station, the mobile browser software will in some embodiments
automatically navigate to the reservation page of Fabian Hotel on
Fabianinkatu, and show the reservation page where an available room for
tonight can be booked within the price range. If the user accepts this
choice by pressing an icon or the like, the auto-filled payment and/or
reservation form appears and the user can book the room by for example
any of the following alternatives: clicking on an icon with a pointer,
pressing a button, entering a number, such as a PIN number or CVC
security code number on the back of a credit and/or debit card. The
preferred webpage could also be ranked first in the hit list 340 in some
embodiments. With the invention a suitable hotel room is found and booked
within 20 seconds and ideally with only a couple of key presses in
response to the confirmations asked by the software of the mobile
station, which is typically the mobile Internet Browser.

[0124] In some embodiments of the invention the screen view 310 with the
decimal co-ordinates is hidden from the user, and in some embodiments
also the map 320 is not displayed. In some embodiments the user can
access these via a menu. In a preferred embodiment the screen blocks 340
and 350 alternate on the screen or are both shown on the screen of the
mobile station 300. As the user and the mobile station move and time goes
by the search query is updated, the search is repeated with updated
parameters and the hit list 340 is updated, the ranking is updated and/or
a new first choice is updated. These updated screen blocks 340, 350 are
then shown on the mobile station screen. In some embodiments five best
matches or any number of best matches is displayed on the mobile station
screen at some intervals so the user can passively view the searched
choices available to him. In some embodiments the results are not shown
on the screen, for example to save power by keeping the screen off. New
updates to the search parameters and new searches based on said
parameters and alerts based on search results that achieve relevance
levels above a certain threshold can still be executed when these
activities or some of them are not displayed on the screen of the mobile
station in accordance with the invention.

[0125] In fact a multitude of display schemes can be implemented in
accordance with the invention to suit individual tastes and mobile
station designs. The main thing about the invention is that the user can
arrange the mobile station to actively browse opportunities relevant to
his space-time position, space-time trajectory, parameters and/or
context; so that he can passively view and/or record the opportunities
available in the information space and react to those that he chooses to
react to with minimal administrative effort. If the user turned on the
inventive walkbrowsing option in the morning with recording of top search
results to a data file, he may view his journey in information space e.g.
by watching the recording in fast forward afterwards in the evening. This
is quite an entertaining and informative feature e.g. in a foreign city.

[0126] It should be noted that multiple passive search queries could be on
at the same time in parallel. A person needing a haircut, and wanting to
buy a purple pullover, could enter both the haircut and the purple
pullover as separate queries into his mobile station, which will then
dynamically search for both items as the user moves with his mobile
station around the city and as time goes by.

[0127] It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the mobile
station 30 and associated systems can be freely permuted and combined
with embodiments 10, 20, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and/or 91 in accordance
with the invention.

[0128] FIG. 4 demonstrates an embodiment 40 of the inventive mobile
station when at least one short range communication link of the invention
is in use. In this embodiment the mobile station 400 is accepting
incoming Bluetooth- and/or WLAN-signals, or other short range signals on
various frequencies. The user is still on Fabianinkatu. The signals that
are in range are Rivoli, Zucchini, Eqvitec, Fabian, Suinno, Bank and
Kamp. These are all businesses and/or organisations that are within a
couple of blocks from the position of the user, and so can reach the
mobile station of the user with their signals.

[0129] The user has "Hotel" inputted as a query term. The mobile station
software searches the information pages in the incoming signals, and
quite quickly deduces that only Fabian, Rivoli and Kamp are hotels. The
mobile station software lists these on the hit list 440, with the hotel
"Fabian" that had the best match to context parameters ranked first, as
explained with embodiment 30.

[0130] The mobile phone software then accesses the information pages via
the short range communication link, and pulls up the reservation page of
the hotel Fabian and displays it on the mobile phone screen. Naturally
these web pages need to be accessible through the short range link as
information pages. In this embodiment the mobile station typically needs
to download information pages via the short range information links to
memory or cache memory, search these information pages and rank the best
matches onto the hit list 440 in accordance with the invention. In this
embodiment at least one search engine of the mobile station would be used
to conduct the searching.

[0131] In another embodiment, at least one query term is sent from the
mobile station via the short range communication links, and the computers
supporting the short range links only send those pages with matches to
the mobile station for further ranking and listing on the hit list 440.
In this embodiment the computer that is arranged to transmit at least one
information page conducts the search with at least one search engine. In
some embodiments at least one search engine is used both at the computer
and the mobile station in accordance with the invention to conduct all or
some of the composed search queries.

[0132] In some preferred embodiments the web pages of the organizations
hosting and/or using the transmitters are simply broadcast via a short
range communication link in addition to the Internet. In some preferred
embodiments the mobile station reads and searches both the incoming
information page signals and the Internet to deduce the hit lists 340 and
440. In this embodiment for example the hit lists 340 and 440 would be
merged into one hit list, with hotel "Fabian" quite probably being ranked
first. It should be noted that the use of the said short range
communication connections such as WLAN and/or Bluetooth is many times
free, where as access to the cellular networks incurs fees. Therefore in
some embodiments the mobile station is arranged to prefer the cheaper
option, which many times leads to the short range connection being
preferred over the cellular connection, when information can be
transferred via either channel to obtain the desired outcome. In some
embodiments the short range connections are searched first, and the
cellular network is used for queries only if no matches are found in the
short range connections.

[0133] Quite clearly booking a hotel room is not a limiting example, but
the invention can be used to transact any products commercially or
non-commercially.

[0134] In some embodiments it is possible to record the hit lists 340, 440
as they change as a function of time, so that the user can later view
what matches in the information space his journey has included.

[0135] The relevance alarm of the mobile station discussed earlier is also
applicable with short range communication links and information pages
transmitted with them.

[0136] Provided at least one search result reaches a certain relevance
level, the mobile station produces a sound, light and/or vibration
signal.

[0137] The click-through rate of an information page at a certain location
is collected by the information page transmitter computer system itself,
and broadcasted to the mobile station in one embodiment. In an
alternative embodiment the mobile station may look up the click-through
rate from another computer in the network and/or the Internet.

[0138] It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the mobile
station 40 and associated systems can be freely permuted and combined
with embodiments 10, 20, 30, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and/or 91 in accordance
with the invention.

[0140] In some embodiments the subscriber terminal has a GPS transceiver
and/or receiver, and it uses the GPS satellite system 520 to deduce its
location. Other satellite systems for locating the subscriber terminal
may be used as they become available in accordance with the invention.
The GPS satellite system typically outputs the latitude and longitude
co-ordinates, but in some embodiments it may also output the height of
position above earth surface to reveal whether the subscriber terminal is
in an aircraft, elevator, skyscraper or the like.

[0141] In some embodiments there is no separate satellite system available
for locating the subscriber terminal. In some embodiments the telephony
network 530 is a satellite telephony network that locates the subscriber
terminal also. In some embodiments the telephony network is a cellular
network, and the location of the subscriber terminal is deduced by
triangulation, cell identity and location of the cell where the
subscriber terminal is currently, or read from any network register such
as HLR (Home Location Register) and/or VLR (Visitor Location Register).

[0143] The location co-ordinates are typically converted to at least one
natural language address at the subscriber terminal 500, and/or over a
network computer that is accessed via the telephony network 530. In some
embodiments the network server doing the co-ordinate→address
transformation hosts or is connected to a search engine 510. In some
embodiments the network server 531 is accessed via the Internet 540, in
some embodiments it may be accessed via a closed network, such as for
example a VPN Virtual Private Network or a telecommunications operator
controlled and/or operated network.

[0144] In some embodiments the subscriber terminal 500 is arranged to
output location coordinates to the search engine 510 directly, which is
arranged to conduct the translation to natural language identifiers
independently.

[0145] The at least one natural language address is then used to compose
at least one search query. In some embodiments user specified query words
are added to at least one query. In some embodiments parameters that are
derived from the file system of the subscriber terminal 500 are added
and/or used to modify at least one search query. The at least one search
query is then sent to the Search Engine 510 over the telephony network
510 that searches the Internet 540 for relevant documents matching the
said at least one search query.

[0146] In some embodiments the search engine deduces the location of the
mobile station from information available in the network, such as
WLAN/WIFI identities, or cellular base station identities or
triangulation using base stations. In some of these embodiments only the
user specified query term is required to be transmitted and/or delivered
from the mobile station to the search engine.

[0147] In some embodiments there are multiple search queries and the
search engine executes multiple searches based on said queries and
composes an aggregate list of the matching documents.

[0148] The co-ordinate→natural language address transformation may
result in multiple addresses and thus multiple search queries in
accordance with the invention. Likewise any search query may also be
synonym expanded in accordance with the invention, for example by
splitting e.g. Hotel, Helsinki, fabianinkatu, to two queries, the
original: Hotel, Helsinki, fabianinkatu and the synonym expanded: Hotel,
Capital of Finland, fabianinkatu.

[0149] In one embodiment the user is browsing for opportunities within a
range of, say 200 m, from his location. This of course leads to multiple
addresses within that range and thus potentially multiple search queries
in accordance with the invention. For example if fabianinkatu 13 in
Helsinki is the mobile station's current location, addresses on
unioninkatu and kasarminkatu will be within 200 m range. If the user
types query word "hotel", the inventive mobile station will convert this
to three queries: 1) Hotel, fabianinkatu, Helsinki 2) Hotel, unioninkatu,
Helsinki 3) Hotel, kasarminkatu, Helsinki. These query strings may be
searched in parallel or in series, and the aggregate search results from
the three queries are consolidated into one list in some embodiments. In
more elaborate embodiments the street number ranges, such as fabianinkatu
23-1 within the desired distances could also be incorporated into the
queries, by having the number range, or one query each for each street
number, as explained before and consolidating search results.

[0150] In some embodiments there is also a search engine in the subscriber
terminal 500. This search engine can be used to search the file system
and/or memory of the mobile station in some embodiments. In some
embodiments a search engine and/or database in the subscriber terminal is
used to conduct the co-ordinate→natural language address
transformation at the subscriber terminal in accordance with the
invention.

[0151] It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the system
50 can be freely permuted and combined with embodiments 10, 20, 30, 40,
60, 70, 80, 90 and/or 91 in accordance with the invention.

[0152] In some embodiment the mobile station only receives the at least
one relevance score and/or metric from the search engine. It is also
possible that the mobile station software is used locally to compute a
relevance score, for example to use contextual local data parameters
and/or save data traffic resources in accordance with the invention. In
both of the aforementioned cases, and other alternative implementations
the relevance can be used as a measure as to whether to initiate a sound,
light and/or vibration alert with the mobile station.

[0153] FIG. 6 demonstrates an embodiment 60 of the inventive communication
system when at least one short range communication link of the invention
is in use. Examples of short range communication links are Bluetooth,
IrDA and/or WLAN, but other options might also be available for the
inventive implementation.

[0154] As the user 650 moves with his subscriber terminal 600 that
comprises at least one search engine the subscriber terminal receives
short range communication signals from information page transmitter
devices 610, 620, 630. These devices are typically computers equipped
with or access to and/or connected to at least one short range
communication link, such as Bluetooth, IrDA, NFC (Near Field
Communication) and/or WLAN or the like. These computers and links
typically transmit the pages that their operators, hosts, and/or
controlling organisations want them to.

[0155] In some embodiments the information pages that are transmitted are
simply the web pages of the sender. Information page transmitter may read
the information pages to be sent from the same folders that host the web
pages in some embodiments, or it may read the web pages to be broadcast
from a different folder on a network computer or on a local computer.

[0156] The search engine in the subscriber terminal 600 will typically
access the information pages via the short range communication link, and
search the information pages with at least one search query. In other
embodiments merely the query is sent to the information page transmitter
computer, which receives the query, searches its pages and returns
matching pages via the short range communication link. The advantage that
the latter embodiment has is that less material needs to be downloaded to
the subscriber terminal 600.

[0157] It should be noted that the short range communication link is a
special embodiment in that it is known that the transmitter is nearby
from the communication type itself. There is therefore less of a need or
no need to locate the subscriber terminal as location information is
intrinsically known. In some embodiments the search query used to search
the information pages omits location related data: it only contains user
specified search terms and/or terms derived from the context and/or file
system of the subscriber terminal.

[0158] In a preferred embodiment the systems 50 and 60 work in parallel,
i.e. information pages received via short range communication links and
Internet pages are searched simultaneously with same or different search
queries in accordance with the invention. As the subscriber terminal
moves, time passes by, or the user changes his query, or the context data
or metadata change by the deletion or addition of data in the mobile
station, the search queries change, short range communication links fall
out of range and come into range, and new matches are dynamically updated
to the aggregate hit list of both hit lists 340, 440 on the subscriber
terminal screen in accordance with the invention. Naturally both
embodiments 50, 60 can be implemented in the same mobile station, to work
separately or together, and in parallel or in series.

[0159] In a preferred embodiment of the invention the embodiments 50 and
60 are combined, and the relevance alarm (sound, light and/or vibration)
is used for relevant search results obtained by searching information
pages via short range communication links and/or the Internet. This
embodiment may also optionally but preferably feature the storing of
click-through rates for search results at a certain location, at a
certain time range and/or associated with a certain user specified query
to measure the consensual relevance of search results obtained from
information pages via short range communication links and/or the
Internet. The said click through rates are optionally but preferably used
to rank the search results in relevance and/or allocate relevance scores
to said search results.

[0160] It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the system
60 can be freely permuted and combined with embodiments 10, 20, 30, 40,
50, 70, 80, 90 and/or 91 in accordance with the invention.

[0161]FIG. 7 demonstrates an embodiment 70 of the inventive processing
method used for example with the electronic page selected with the
inventive browsing method. The invention can be used to just passively
view pages of information. However, this embodiment relates to the
situation where the user and the page provider have an interaction and
exchange information, for example in a commercial transaction. In phase
700 an electronic form on the page is filled automatically by the mobile
station and/or network server software. In one embodiment this happens so
that the entry fields on the electronic page are identified and the text
descriptor associated with them. For example if the electronic page has
an entry that is titled "First Name" the First Name is searched and
possibly also synonym expanded against data in the subscriber terminal.
As the subscriber terminal is registered, to say the inventor, from the
registration data, it can be searched that the "First Name" matches with
"Mikko". Consequently, the mobile station and/or network server software
enters "Mikko" into this entry field. The same process is repeated to all
other entry fields from the same or different data source, such as last
name, address, telephone number, credit card number, customer loyalty
card number and so on.

[0162] In some embodiments the data is already at the server, for example
because the user has filled the form before, and has been issued a
username and/or a password. In these embodiments the subscriber terminal
software can auto-register by automatically filling username and/or
password and logging in. In some embodiments the subscriber terminal may
log the user onto the server and provide identification information by
submitting phone number, credit card number, bank account number and/or
passport ID, all of which are typically unique and can be used to deduce
other personal details of the user.

[0163] In phase 710 the user adds data in some embodiments. For example in
one embodiment, at least one entry field is always left unfilled. This is
to ensure that the user correctly fills at least one entry field in
person, so that unknown people do not submit fraudulent information with
the auto-fill feature or that the mobile station does not accidentally
submit automatically filled forms without the user becoming aware of the
process. For example, in one embodiment, especially when the electronic
form involves a commercial transaction and a payment, the user is asked
to enter as PIN number, the PIN number of his payment card and/or the
security code on his and/or behind his payment card and/or the PIN in the
mobile station and/or SIM card.

[0164] In phase 720 after the form has been submitted a copy of the filled
form is captured in a file, for example a PDF file in some embodiments.
Any other file format is also in accordance with the invention such as an
image file format such as JPG, PNG, or other document formats such as
Postscript and the like in accordance with the invention.

[0165] In phase 730 the file that contains the form is sent to a remote
computer. This remote computer is a computer server that in some
embodiments belongs to the employer of the user. In phase 740 relevant
data is searched from the form and stored by archiving software in some
embodiments. The form and the file can also be stored as a backup in
accordance with the invention in some embodiments. In some embodiments
the extracted data is stored and processed in a book keeping and/or
financial software such as NetVisor® or the like.

[0166] It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the method
70 can be freely permuted and combined with embodiments 10, 20, 30, 40,
50, 60, 80, 90 and/or 91 in accordance with the invention.

[0167] FIG. 8 demonstrates an embodiment 80 of the inventive processing
method used with an electronic page, for example selected with the
inventive browsing method. Say the invention is used at Heathrow airport
as described with the earlier embodiments by a person stepping out of
immigration, and deciding to proceed to central London after the flight.
He types "train to London" to his mobile station, and the Internet and/or
incoming short range communication signals are searched. The searches
reveal options listed in the hit list 810 on the screen.

[0168] Now as the search results show all available train routes and their
timetables, the user can choose the preferred route and transport option
whilst he is approaching the different train stations.

[0169] The user chooses Heathrow Express, and the reservation page of
Heathrow Express is accessed, and the reservation form is partly or
entirely auto-filled by the mobile station software. In some embodiments
the user can fill the reservation form also himself. In the example of
FIG. 8 the single ticket to Central London (Paddington) is selected, and
the receipt for that ticket and possibly a separate ticket itself is sent
by return via the Internet and/or via the short range communication
connection in accordance with the invention.

[0170] In some embodiments the form is filled via e.g. Bluetooth and/or
WLAN, and the payment of the ticket is conducted via an NFC (near field
communication) link.

[0171] It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the method
80 can be freely permuted and combined with embodiments 10, 20, 30, 40,
50, 60, 70, 90 and/or 91 in accordance with the invention.

[0172] It should be noted that generally for search to be effective, there
are two overriding criteria: The searcher needs to search diligently, and
the thing being searched would need to be available for finding.

[0173] Consequently, the invention will work a lot better with companies
and organizations that design their web pages better, to reflect a "let's
do business in the next 2 minutes on the spot" scenario. If we observe
Heathrow Express webpage at the time of the invention, the inventive
search method would need to parse and combine several web pages to get to
the flexibility and availability of information shown in FIG. 9. The time
tables are on different pages to the booking prompt or do not exist, and
there is no news on when the next train is about to depart, except that
it will be in 15 minutes. Instead the webpage is littered with
infomercials: John Lewis department stores is teaching people how to
pack, and providing vouchers. However the inventive storing of
click-through rates at a location, and their use in composing relevance
scores greatly relieves this need to design better web pages.
Irrespective of badly formulated queries and poor web page design for
search engines, if there is a strong consensual relevance evidence by
high click through rates at that location, the search engine can dig a
badly written webpage even with mistyped query: At heathrow, when using
the invention and typing "tran" the Heathrow express webpages come up
first, because a high percentage of mistyping people at hurry at Heathrow
click through to the Heathrow Express web pages with this query, even
though the web pages themselves do not feature any tags to attract
mistyped queries such as "trin" "tran" "tain" or the like.

[0174] The reservation system would of course benefit from a greater time
resolution than 15 minutes, but this would require the web page operator
to publish the prospected departure times from Heathrow or London in real
time on a web page, as the trains move in real time so that the web
crawler software can find the information. Obviously, the web crawler
cannot find information that simply is not there. For time sensitive
information the web pages contain a tag and/or generate metadata that
alerts the web crawler to revisit the page frequently enough to maintain
sufficient time resolution in some embodiments of the invention. In some
embodiments of the invention the search engine providers could even
charge a fee for these tags and/or metadata. However, a more practical
solution is to use the click-through rates and the consensual relevance
ranking of the invention as discussed earlier.

[0175] Adding time and space criteria proposes new challenges and
improvements for the search engine itself. Address related information is
expressed as keywords, so in some embodiments the addresses are handled
as normally by searching matches with keywords using synonym expansions,
other query term expansions, and other prior art techniques, many of
which are discussed in references in detail.

[0176] However, current search engine technology has a bit of a difficulty
with opening times, departure times, i.e. searches where relevance is
dynamically changing. For example, the reader recalls the user from the
Summary--section of this application, walking on Piccadilly with the
"walkbrow" invention of this application on in his mobile
station.-->The Royal Academy of Arts would not be a very relevant
match on the hit list, if it would not be open to the public at the time
of the walk.

[0177] FIG. 9 shows an embodiment of index 90 in accordance with the
invention which may be used for example by a search engine of the
invention. The index is represented by a matrix where documents
(docx) are related to their keywords (kwx). In a prior art
matrix the vector space is typically binary, i.e. the entries are either
0 or 1, depending on whether the keyword occurs in the document and/or is
associated with the document or not, or real value weighted as discussed
with FIG. 1. Needless to say, a present day index can be humongous, for
example the index used by Google, Yahoo, or other large search engines
quite probably has one or more indices comprising millions of entries.

[0178] The index of the invention is time and/or space sensitive. This can
be implemented in a multitude of ways in accordance with the invention.
We will consider the temporal case first. Assume Doc1 relates to web
pages of a cafe that is open from 8 am-6 pm. The index 90 contains a
vector t_range in one embodiment that specifies whether the cafe is open
at the time of the query. In a practical use scenario user uses the
inventive mobile station to launch the query "cafe" in the postcode area
of the cafe at 7 pm. The mobile station, network computer and/or search
engine will calculate a real value weight or binary weight in [Doc1,
t_range] element which is arranged to increase or decrease the relevance
of the Doc1 documents to the query from said mobile station.
Typically the fact that the facilities are open for business carries a
heavy relevance weight, with closed facilities ranked irrelevant and thus
low, and open facilities ranked high in some embodiments of the
invention. In this case the cafe is closed so [Doc1, t_range] should
have a value that is low.

[0179] In some embodiments the [Docn, t_range] is just added to real
value weights of Docn, and its value is chosen so that Docn
will rank high when the facility is open and relevant, moderately high
when relevant and closed, and irrelevant and open, and irrelevant and
closed follow in this order of relevance.

[0180] One option to acquire the values to the t_range vector is to use
web crawlers to crawl the web pages for opening times and time ranges,
especially when they occur together like "open mon-sat 7-4" from web
pages, instead of not entering them into the index.

[0181] If the opening times are in image format, OCR can be used by the
web crawler to scan the information and thereby retrieve it. The time of
the query is typically the time at which the query occurs e.g. 5 pm, or
if the query itself contains the time e.g. "table for 7 pm?", that is the
time of the query. So if the query is "Table?" at 5 pm the mobile station
will show restaurant vacancies close by that have a free table now, but
if the query is table for 7 pm the mobile station display will show
vacancies of restaurants close by at 7 pm, even if current time is at 5
pm in accordance with the invention in some embodiments. Similarly the
location of query can be the current location and/or the location in the
query in some embodiments of the invention.

[0182] Also indexes with a location vector and also location and temporal
vectors are in accordance with the invention. Most location based
identifiers have natural language descriptors that are intensively
indexed already by the prior art web crawlers. It is the temporal data
that is not indexed sufficiently for the "walkbrowsing" described in this
application. This problem is also alleviated with the calculation,
estimation and/or storage of click-through rates as a function of
location of user's mobile station, current time and/or at least one
current query term. The click-through rates are typically stored in a
search engine server computer or a search engine server computer network,
where the click-through rates can be used to compute relevance scores and
rank search results.

[0183] Existing web crawlers such as LibWWW Robot of the W3C Consortium,
or Perl based crawler interface by Gisle Aas or Parallel UserAgent by
Marc Langheinrich, or the Visual Web Spider by Newprosoft.com could be
inventively modified with the above improvement to supply the time
sensitive data from web pages to the search engine of the invention. The
additional inventive software in the Visual Web Spider, or any prior art
web crawler crawls & scans for opening time related words and numbers. In
some embodiments, these data are placed in the t_range column or the like
in the inventive search engine and index relation.

[0184] It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the
embodiment 90 can be freely permuted and combined with embodiments 10,
20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 and/or 91 in accordance with the invention.

[0185] Lastly let us look at FIG. 10 that shows an embodiment 91 of the
invention as a network diagram. The search engines at the subscriber
terminal and/or the network compose and manage at least one index
relationship. The subscriber terminal (600) gets its location from the
GPS satellite system (520) or the cellular network, and this is
translated to at least one natural language address or range of addresses
in the address database (910, 920) on the subscriber terminal or the
network. The natural language addresses become query terms that are
searched against the keywords in the index (arrows 1a, 1b, 1c), to
discover matching documents on the Internet or information page
transmitters (arrows 2a, 2b, 2c, 2d). The most matching documents are
listed to the user dynamically, and as the subscriber terminal moves and
time goes by, or the user enters/changes a user specified search term,
this activity is repeated to deliver the most relevant documents to the
screen of the subscriber terminal (600). Quite clearly as queries get
split and expanded to several parallel queries, and as the parameters
change with user motion and time, there will be a lot more queries
executed at a higher frequency than in conventional mobile search use
today. The future might hold that a user walking on a street generates a
hundred queries every 50 m. However, this increased traffic will allow
users to identify interesting documents and real life opportunities
spontaneously with less amount of effort than ever before.

[0186] It should be noted that any features, phases or parts of the
embodiment 91 can be freely permuted and combined with embodiments 10,
20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 and/or 90 in accordance with the invention.

[0187] The invention has been explained above with reference to the
aforementioned embodiments and several commercial and industrial
advantages have been demonstrated. The methods and arrangements of the
invention allow people to scan opportunities passively in the information
space as they traverse through space-time in their own context, and
receive an alarm of only relevant search results in the physical
proximity. The invention facilitates on-demand effortless Mobile Short
Range Search that allows the users to access opportunities that they did
not know about, or would not have had time to find out about, with
minimum effort and cost as the software of the mobile phone is scanning
the Internet and information pages for these opportunities and displaying
the results dynamically on the mobile phone screen. The invention
improves search engine performance for Mobile Search, as the inventive
method takes into account the consensual nature of mobile search at a
specific location.

[0188] The invention has been explained above with reference to the
aforementioned embodiments. However, it is clear that the invention is
not only restricted to these embodiments, but comprises all possible
embodiments within the spirit and scope of the inventive thought and the
following patent claims.